Police arrested him outside his home in the Mexican capital.
Mexico’s former justice minister Jesus Murillo has been arrested on charges of enforced disappearances, torture and obstruction of justice in the case of the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, Reuters reports, citing judicial sources.
A Justice Department statement said federal police had executed an arrest warrant issued by a judge in the Mexican capital against Jesus M., but a judicial source confirmed to Reuters that it was Mourinho. Police arrested him outside his home in the Mexican capital.
Jesus Murillo served as Mexico’s Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2015 during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto. During that time he oversaw the investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayochinapa teacher training school in the southwestern state of Guerrero.
Foreign experts have criticized the investigation, citing a series of errors and abuses. When President Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018, he pledged to shed light on the case.
Asked about the government’s initiative to evaluate the previous investigation, Murillo had said he was willing to testify.
His arrest came a day after Deputy Interior Minister Alejandro Encinas called the case a “state crime” and claimed government officials were involved. He claimed, in fact, that the highest echelons of Peña Nieto’s government orchestrated a cover-up of the case.
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, students from the teachers’ school in Ayutthaya went to the nearby town of Iguala with the intention of “demanding” buses to go to the capital, where they wanted to participate in a demonstration.
According to the investigation, the 43 youths were arrested by police officers working with the Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”) drug cartel, then shot and their bodies charred, for reasons that still remain unclear — according to the original version, the killers thought they were members of a rival gang. The families of the victims reject the official version. Almost eight years later, the remains of three of the victims have been identified.
Mexico is seeking the extradition from Israel of a former associate of Mourinho, who is also accused of tampering with the investigation.
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